Stern, Steve
STERN, STEVE
STERN, STEVE (1947– ), U.S. novelist and short-story writer. Stern was born in Memphis and educated at Rhodes College, where he received his B.A., and at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, where he received an M.F.A. in creative writing. Among the most gifted writers of his generation, Stern brought an unusual locale to American-Jewish writing: the "Pinch," the once-vibrant East European Jewish community of Memphis. He had become acquainted with the Pinch while working at the Center for Southern Folklore, making transcriptions of oral histories. He became the director of the "Lox and Grits" project, one that involved preserving the recollections of those who lived in the Pinch.
It was only when he began to write in his mid-twenties that he discerned the echoes of the literature that became important to him. Among the influences on his work are Kafka and Peretz: he calls them "palate-cleansers." Babel and Malamud are what he terms "compasses" that he refers to when his work "goes awry."
His work keeps alive the grand traditions of mythographic narrative. In his fiction, Jewish characters find themselves confronting angels, the figure of death, and tales within tales that ensnare the teller and the listener. His writing can be placed in the long tradition of Yiddish folktales and aggadah that see our daily life as carried out within a culture's embroidered rendition of the sacred. His works can also be placed alongside Jewish writers who separated a strict realism from the poetics of the imagination: a choice between how the world empirically appears, as opposed to the possibilities we imagine the world to contain. Among his works are Isaac and the Undertaker's Daughter (1983); The Moon and Ruben Shein: A Novel (1984); Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven: Stories (1986); Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground (1991); A Plague of Dreamers: Three Novellas (1994), The Wedding Jester (1999; National Jewish Book Award Winner), and The Angel of Forgetfulness (2005).
[Lewis Fried (2nd ed.)]